McLaren driver Fernando Alonso has admitted that to get anywhere in Formula One you have to leave your heart out of it.
Speaking on the team’s official website, the double world champion explained that while he doesn’t hate his colleagues, he needs to be selfish and get an advantage over them any way he can….
“You need to have no heart,” he says. “You are not enemies with the other drivers, but you have to focus on yourself to win. If you can ‘hurt’ someone by getting an advantage over them, that’s even better.”
“I am a competitive person and competition is important in F1, but I don’t race in F1 for the competition. I can get that in other areas of my life, like cycling and playing tennis – or racing my mother to the supermarket. The reason I race in F1 is because the cars give me a feeling that I can’t get anywhere else. It’s unique.”
“It’s hard to explain what this feeling is like because nothing else comes close to F1. Your brain has to re-set every time you get in the car because things happen so fast. If you haven’t driven an F1 car for a few weeks, the level of performance takes you by surprise.”
“I go karting to enjoy the competition; I drive in F1 for this feeling. The driving styles in karting and F1 are quite similar, but nothing unexpected happens in a go-kart. Your brain is never taken by surprise. You can predict everything that the kart is going to do. That isn’t the case in F1, where you’re taken by surprise all the time. When you hit the brakes, your brain takes 0.2s to catch up. That’s a very nice feeling; that is the feeling.”
Alonso is busy preparing for the upcoming 2017 championship season which will get underway on March 26 at Albert Park in Melbourne Australia.
